Your views in 200 words or less

September 21, 2011 2:09 pm

Can anyone explain why so many middle-class voters I know prefer the Republican Party? The answer is simple. Smart voters remember that during Bill Clinton’s presidency, he had to endure a Republican Congress that was able to hold down his reckless spending. The Republican Congress during Clinton’s term is why the economy thrived.

Poor President Bush. The economy was good the first 7 1/2 years of Bush’s term, but, alas, the electorate voted in a Democratic Congress and, as a result, the economy began to tank. The media blamed Bush for the economic problems when they should have blamed the Democratic Congress.

It seems obvious that Democrats thrive on people’s misery. We now have a president who refuses to listen to rational economists who recommend less government spending and fewer regulations on business. If present government trends continue, we will all “enjoy” Democratic Party misery.

Feeds

I’m kidding. That is called the “logical fallacy,” and ignores the fact that taxes then were far higher in nations with which we were competing. Tax rates in most industrialized nations have fallen far more than have ours, particularly corporate and capital gains rates…

God Mildred–you are not one of those are you? 7 1/2 years things were peachy under Shrub? Are you kididng me? Maybe if we had thre trillions of dollars his two unfunded wars have cost we could make a dent in the de t.

Don’t blame me I voted for Hillary PUMA (Party Unity My Ass club). Even Rush Limbaugh wants Hillary. Anyone but Obama. Get over your guilt America. Now let’s elect a person with credentials and who can lead.

Bush job creation. Looking at Bureau of Labor Statistics seasonally adjusted numbers for nonfarm jobs (defined as those not involving farm work, general government, private households, or nonprofit organizations serving individuals), in its 8 years (from January 2001 to January 2009 ), the Bush Administration created 1,950,000 jobs or 20,313/month. 150,000 to 200,000 per month would be expected to accompany an economic expansion or, in other words, 14.4 million to 19.2 million over the course of an 8 year Presidency. Under Bush, the economy also lost 4,469,000 manufacturing jobs. These are jobs that traditionally had good wages and benefits and at the end of the Bush Administration accounted for only 12.65 million of the nation’s 134.42 million nonfarm jobs (or 9.4% of them). Bush lost twice as many of these good paying manufacturing jobs during his time in office as he has created jobs of all other kinds. In all, the US lost 26.1% of its manufacturing jobs under Bush.

By contrast in the 8 years of the Clinton Administration (from January 1993 to January 2001), 22,744,000 nonfarm jobs were created or ~237,000/month. Bush’s job creation rate was only 8.6% of the Clinton rate. At the same time, manufacturing jobs in the Clinton years showed a modest increase of 323,000.

The high point for Bush job growth came in December 2007 just as, according to the NBER, the economy went into recession. At that point, Bush had created 5,609,000 (67,578/month) or a quarter of those created by Clinton. From then to the end of his term, the economy shed 3,733,000 jobs (2,634,000 in the last 5 months of his term alone).

See aislander, I can play the same game. (the difference, of course, is that during the Clinton years the economy was far better than in the Bush years the Clinton economy was still just a bubble built on FED manipulations)

What you don’t seem to get, beerBoy, is that the parties are what people make them. They are tools that like-minded people can use to create policy by winning elections.

Your idea that parties are immutable entities that ignore their bases has been debunked by events. The Democrat party is very different now than it was in the time of Henry Jackson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and the TEA party has drastically changed the Republican party.

I have been involved with the TEA party since its still-recent inception, and I can assure you (contrary to lefty propaganda) that it IS a grassroots movement…

aislander wrote, “I have been involved with the TEA party since its still-recent inception, and I can assure you (contrary to lefty propaganda) that it IS a grassroots movement…” Grassroots are usually found in dirt. That does apply in this case too.
Gen. McAuliff set the example by saying “nuts” to a request from some crazy folks. He would say “nuts” to what the TEA party stands for too.

Mildred,
A great letter!!! Love it!! You will get a lot of liberal postings against you but don’t pay any mind to them. They love to whine. There will be many people that will smile when reading your letter, and agree with you 100%. Again, a great letter. Thank you!!

I agree with Afret, first off its factually wrong to say Bush had 7 1/2 good years, most economists see the first year or two of Bush’s presidency as being stained by a dot-com bubble burst and the post-September 11th recession. After that recession, economic growth was moderate and mostly the result of the Housing Bubble, which created the economic disaster we live in today. Also, at the time when Bush was elected the Senate/House were both Republican-controlled. The Federal budget went into deficit spending after four years of surpluses under Clinton (odd, since all branches of government were controlled by Republicans). In August 2006, housing prices started slipping backwards and economic growth began to slow way down, and people were getting tired of fighting pointless wars in the Middle East, so the Democrats re-took control of Congress that fall. Most Republicans I know have selective memory about how things played out. I’ve had some tell me that its Government’s fault for the Housing Bubble, because they pressured banks to make unsafe loans. I tell them its true, under George W. Bush’s ‘Ownership Society’, the government openly promoted and encouraged people to own houses regardless of their means, and touted those exotic mortgages as innovative ways to accomplish the goal of Ownership Society. It wasn’t some communist dictator holding a gun to a bank manager’s head threatening to pull the trigger if he didn’t issue a loan to a person with bad credit. It was a conservative, Republican president trying to push his capitalist dream of every person in America owning their own property. Not saying its a bad dream, but it is (partially) responsible for the mess we are in today.

aislander – your admission of Tea Party participation is hardly a revelation – I have gleaned over the years that you are white, intelligent, with more than a High School education and in the upper regions of Middle Class. You are also highly selective of which facts you choose to accept to the point of being anti-intellectual – this is exactly the profile of a TP .

I don’t see you as the Dormouse…..more the March Hare but you consider yourself in the Mad Hatter role.

I have made repeated posts that demonstrate that I believe that both Parties have devolved since Reagan’s voodoo turned neo-liberalism into a religion and even before.

There was a time that the Dems could believably make the claim that they were the Party that supported the working class. There was a time that the GOP could make the believable claim that they were the Party that supported individual rights and responsibilities. Neither can make those claims anymore.

So…beerBoy…if the the parties are subject to change, why are you so willing to give up on them? THAT’S where I inferred the idea that you thought they were “immutable entities.” And what do you propose to replace them? Third parties are exercises in Onanism….

“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”

Funny…..you have proclaimed yourself as an “originalist” yet you somehow forget that the Constitution doesn’t enshrine the Two Party system and, in fact, there have been more than two parties throughout our history.

You suggest that I have declared the dem/pubs as immutable entities yet you suggest that anything but submission to the two parties is mastabatory.

I am not “anti-intellectual,” beerBoy. I do disparage intellectualism when it constitutes a closed system, putting intellectual constructs above real-world experience (you know: like Keynesian economics or the War on Poverty…). Ideas need honest feedback–and their enthusiasts need the ability to bring that feedback to bear–to carry any weight with me…

…that is not to say that I don’t enjoy playing with ideas for their own sake, but the operative word is “playing.” Unlike liberal intellectuals, I entertain no urge to inflict shiny, new untested ideas on the world at large. Small-scale testing would be acceptable if the concepts showed some promise, however…

I don’t dismiss that apparent success; i merely believe it was anomalous; not relevant to conditions current in the US; and not really relevant to the US in the ’30s due to differences between the nations in question.

Do you believe that we now have the flexibility with respect to the labor force that is called for in Keynesian theory?

Since attempted manipulation by government of an economy does not occur in a vacuum, I believe, too, that crediting Keynesian measures for economic resurgence is committing the logical fallacy of mistaking coincidence for causation. Therefore, an isolated good outcome here and there is not dispositive…

Obama closed his proposal to raise taxes saying, “It’s about whether we are, in fact, in this together, and we’re looking out for one another. We know what’s right. It’s time to do what’s right”

In other words, it’s all about confiscating and redistributing wealth from the most productive group of job creators in America–small business owners–to the least productive groups, mostly those who subsist on the state. That does not constitute “looking out for one another” and is most decidedly NOT “what’s right”.

Mildred, you are so right saying “We now have a president who refuses to listen to rational economists who recommend less government spending and fewer regulations on business.”

Since attempted manipulation by government of an economy does not occur in a vacuum, I believe, too, that crediting Keynesian measures for economic resurgence is committing the logical fallacy of mistaking coincidence for causation. Therefore, an isolated good outcome here and there is not dispositive…

Care to explain away the failure of supply side to “raise all boats” or the reality that neo-liberal economic policies have only had any staying power due to the sequence of balloons made possible by the manipulation of the FED? Or why the Thatcher/Reagan approach that has been dutifully followed for the past three decades isn’t exactly the reason why we are in such a mess?

Again those that do “better” (however that is measured) are doing someting more effective you (and I) are not.

You mean like the Goldman Sachs/AIG execs who got million dollar bonuses after destroying the world’s economy? Yep, they were certainly more effective as royally screwing everything up than I (and I assume you) could ever be.

Rent-seeking outfits such as Goldman-Sachs and GE are the near-opposite of the free market. Government is so entrenched in our economic system that the Thatcher-Reagan reforms barely made a dent in correcting the distortions of the market…

Unfortunately, capitalism isn’t based upon excess capital being reinvested, rather, it is through credit. The Banksters then claim the total projected income from interest over the life of the loan as real assets that they currently have (even though the income is projected – thus virtual) in order to finance even more loans.

As we are seeing now, it is a house of cards – debt being financed by debt which is guaranteed by debt. It is the ultimate Ponzi scheme.

This is why regulations were put into place post-Depression – to prevent the Banksters from getting out of hand again. Unfortunately, in the neo-liberal (read: Thatcher/Reagan) economic philosophy-driven governments they rescinded those regulations.

The truly obscene thing is, even after the crash and the bail-outs the regulations still haven’t been fully put back into place. Aislander notes that these organizations aren’t really within the parameters of healthy capitalist practices so even he should support regulating these lampreys sucking the life out of healthy commerce.

Ever wonder why, beerBoy, the most fervid enthusiasts of regulation of any industry are the biggest players in that industry? Even when smaller competitors try to gain a competitive advantage by advocating for regulation, the final products always seem to favor the dominant companies. It’s called politics.

The banking regulations that you celebrate are having extremely adverse effects on–surprise!–smaller banks…

Did you know that Saudi Prince Talal recently increased his share in Citibank
from 5% to 6%?…..Buy low…

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